This week’s Debt Report

We're lax on security, scammers are disguising clunkers, we don't vacation — but we're still happy.

Career: Money can’t sell happiness

You’ve heard the maxim money can’t buy happiness, but it turns out the opposite is also true — for most of us.

National staffing firm Spherion released a survey showing only one in five Americans consider compensation the biggest factor in their job satisfaction. In fact, there’s not much agreement about the biggest factor. Responses ran the gamut from being passionate about the field to job security to flextime and company culture.

The good news is that, whatever their reasons, 92 percent of workers are at least “somewhat happy,” and more than half are “extremely” happy.

Stress: Hurting company morale and the bottom line, study says

If you find all that happiness hard to believe, new research from Randstad might help it all make sense: Just because we’re happy doesn’t mean we plan to stay.

The human resources firm found out pay was the top reason people were most likely to quit their jobs, cited by 37 percent. A lack of opportunities to advance and high stress each accounted for another quarter of workers ready to quit.

The study found women are slightly more likely to quit over stress than men, but there wasn’t much difference across age groups.

Cars: Turning lemons into lemonade

Carfax, a company that sells vehicle history reports, is warning about doctored ones.

“Nearly 800,000 used cars lurking on America’s roads right now may be part of an emerging fraud called title washing,” CarFax says. Most of them are in New Jersey, North Carolina, Mississippi, California, and Georgia.

Scammers are taking salvage cars, fixing up the exterior, and moving them out of state — where they can fake a clean title and resell it to people who don’t know what to look for. Carfax obviously offers the self-serving solution, but you can also have a mechanic take a look before you buy.

Security: We still don’t change passwords enough

It really doesn’t matter how many security breaches there are. We’ve pretty much given up already.

Research from polling group YouGov shows three quarters of us still use the same password for multiple sites, and a third of us use the same password for everything.

Americans don’t change those passwords often, either. Only about half have changed their banking or social media passwords in the past year.

Travel: Vacations make you feel sexy

That’s literally one of the conclusions from Diamond Resorts International’s “vacation doctor,” in the company’s latest research. They asked people who did and didn’t vacation how they felt about life. Not surprisingly, more than three-quarters of those who vacation every year are generally happy with life. They feel healthier, more energetic, and better about work than their workaholic counterparts.

But here’s the kicker: More than half of survey participants didn’t take all their vacation days, and forfeited on average more than 7 full days off. A paid week and a half off down the drain, and people are still happy with their jobs?